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Gary Jennings Is Dead at 70; Author of the Best Seller 'Aztec'

Gary Jennings, a prolific writer whose books included the best-selling novel ''Aztec,'' about the Aztec war against the Spanish conquistadors, died on Saturday at his home in Pompton Lakes, N.J. He was 70.

The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Hiram.

Mr. Jennings's novels were mostly sprawling historical works, sometimes reaching 500,000 words, packed with research, violence, braggadocio and vivid sex scenes. They usually revolved around a picaresque central character who comes of age at a crucial historic moment. In addition to his nine novels, most of them for adults, one written under the pseudonym Gabriel Quyth, he explored linguistics in ''The World of Words: The Personalities of Language,'' and wrote 10 nonfiction books for younger readers.

He was born in 1928 in Buena Vista, Va., the son of a printer. For all his love of research, Mr. Jennings was self-taught and never went to college. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and worked as a commercial artist and as a newspaper reporter. He was also managing editor of two men's magazines, Dude and Gent. During the Korean War, he served as a war correspondent for the Army, and was awarded a Bronze Star.

Mr. Jennings married and divorced three times. In addition to his brother, of Flora, Miss., he is survived by a son from his first marriage, Jesse, of Spring, Tex.

His first big publishing success came with ''Aztec,'' published in 1980. The novel is narrated by Mixtli, or Dark Cloud, an Aztec Indian referred to as ''an Aeolus with an inexhaustible bag of wind'' who reminisces about his life as a merchant, warrior and diplomat during the time of Cortes.

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To write the book, Mr. Jennings lived for 12 years in Mexico. ''I learned to interpret the ancient pictograph codices and read Nahuatl, the Aztec language,'' he told The New York Times. In his review in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called ''Aztec'' ''a dazzling and hypnotic historical novel.'' In one scene, Mr. Jennings described a glorious Aztec city, Tenochtitlan, and its buildings: ''Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame -- here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake.''

Sometimes, though, when it came to describing his characters, critics felt that Mr. Jennings fell short. Gerald Jonas, reviewing ''Aztec'' in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Jennings's ''vacillating Motecuzoma,'' or Montezuma, as the conquering Spaniards called him, had ''all the tragic dimensions of a losing coach.''

Mr. Jennings took pride in the accuracy of his historical research on everything from Marco Polo's journeys for his novel ''The Journeyer'' (1984), to 19th-century circus life in the novel ''Spangle'' (1987), for which he traveled with nine different circuses. In ''Raptor'' (1992), he described a Goth's adventures during the days of the Roman Empire.

His last novel, ''Aztec Autumn'' (1997), was a sequel to ''Aztec.'' At the time of his death, said Mr. Jennings's literary agent, Gene Winick, he was working on a historical novel set in Babylon, and, with his nephew Marc, on an opera based on the life of the labor organizer Joe Hill.

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A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on February 18, 1999, on Page C00023 of the National edition with the headline: Gary Jennings Is Dead at 70; Author of the Best Seller 'Aztec'. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe